Assetto Corsa EVO Early Access Review – Bogged down off the line

thesixthaxis.com:

Assetto Corsa EVO’s Early Access launch has felt a bit like trying to drive British roads over the last couple of years. There’s more potholes than you can shake a stick at, an endless string of road works as water pipes burst and need emergency repairs, as alt nets dig trenches for their own fibre networks, and more. Kunos Simulazioni’s games are lauded as some of the best driving and racing sims out there, but on day one that’s coming with more than a few rough edges.

Of course, that’s exactly what Early Access is for. It’s there to let developers release early with a subset of content, an acceptance of bugs and issues, and a preview of what’s to come through a roadmap of updates. Even so, Assetto Corsa Evo has stalled at the starting line on some of its key features.

It’s a tale that’s practically as old as online gaming: server issues. Assetto Corsa Evo is planned to be an always online game, tying progression through the career, car unlocks and more to being logged in, much like we see in Gran Turismo 7. While this can be nominally justified to preserve the integrity of a game’s experience when seeing other players, when the servers don’t work (whether that’s launch day overloading or at the inevitable shutdown sometime in the next decade), it locks off major parts of the game. In Assetto Corsa Evo’s case, it meant the first batch of 20 cars was initially locked down to just 5 on day one, until Kunos hurriedly patched the game to make all cars available without the nascent career and driving academy.

Online features are now being separately stress tested through specific beta builds and time windows, working to build it back into the main branch of the game as soon as possible.

That’s far from the only issue at this point, with bugs in setting up racing wheels – though immediately recognised, there’s no obvious preset for my Fanatec CSL Elite and McLaren wheel, and I had to disable other controllers to have it recognised – some complaints over performance with the